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Encourage W/VE stations to expand knowledge of DX propagation on the HF and MF bands, improve operating skills, and improve station capability by creating a competition in which DX stations may only contact W/VE stations.

Objectives:

W/VE amateurs work as many DX stations in as many DXCC entities as possible on the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meter bands.

DX stations work as many W/VE stations in as many of the 48 contiguous states and provinces as possible.

Video: KA4UDX operating on 40 Meters (7 Mhz band) in ARRL DX Contest. Notice the level of QRM (A Q Signal indicating “being interfered with…”) – interference from other stations, etc. Also notice stations operating split-frequency rather than 1 single frequency. Quite a bit of skill and capability are required to do all of this. The S/N – Signal to Noise Ratio is from bad to terrible. An average Cell phone and MP3 weaned person would probably “hang up” and give up. Not ham radio operators! It is these skills that allow them to get a message through, for example in an emergency, when conditions are quite a bit less than favorable. This also hones skills in Radio Propagation … as these signals are bounced off the upper atmosphere (Ionosphere) and certain bands work at certain times of day or night.

Lots and lots of Ham Radio (Amateur Radio) operators in the U.S. and around the world will be transmitting radio signals in an effort to contact as many other operators / stations DX (far away, non-local) as possible.

The ARRL International DX Contest starts tonight at 7 pm Eastern Time ( 00:00 Zulu) or Universal Time Coordinated 00:00 until 23:59 Zulu on Sunday – Ham radio operators will be operating between 100 watts and one Kilowatt this weekend. Between 1.8 and 30 Mhz. There will likely be more signals – more RF on the air waves than other times of the year.

Actually you will be quite safe … less danger than the Myan end of world this year. Most signals will go over your head at relatively high angles and those that come down will be at low enough of a dBm (signal strength) to not bother you.

Like this:

KA4UDX <-> ZL2WL on 20 Meters (14.160 Mhz) – with a pretty good DX pileup on him. I couldn’t seem to raise him on OCF Dipole Antenna – Switched to Ground Mounted Trapped Vertical Antenna and got him with about 500 watts station power output here. He is coming in very good, very readable, around 5-5 to 5-7 R.S.T. signal pretty steady going on over 1/2 hour now.

For example you are trying to install “nmap” on Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 … and you get this CRAP … And no matter what you do APT installer won’t shut up … and won’t install anything else. And it seems you cannot uninstall these myqsl things … Several other posts online failed to give enough information to fix this. But this one post did. First of all this is the situation as I was seeing it:

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root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# apt-get install nmap

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

You might want to run `apt-get -f install’ to correct these:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

mysql-cluster-server-5.1: Depends: mysql-cluster-client-5.1 but it is not going to be installed

* For those of you that DON’T CARE click Next now … everyone else keep going. This is an EXACT paste from my Terminal screen on the Ubuntu box showing when the problem cleared up. It may look like a jumbled mess … but it worked … and I was able to install NMAP with APT right at the end:
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root@ka4udx-desktop:/usr/lib# ls -l *mysql*

ls: cannot access *mysql*: No such file or directory

root@ka4udx-desktop:/usr/lib# cd /var/spool/

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls

anacron cron cups exim4 mail openoffice plymouth

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so.16.0.0^C

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls /usr/var

ls: cannot access /usr/var: No such file or directory

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls /var/

backups crash lib lock mail run tmp

cache games local log opt spool www

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls /var/cache/

apache2 debconf gdm man software-center

apt dictionaries-common hald pm-utils

binfmts flashplugin-installer jockey pppconfig

cups fontconfig ldconfig samba

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls /var/cache/apt

archives pkgcache.bin srcpkgcache.bin

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# ls /var/cache/apt/archives/

lock

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# apt-get clean all

E: Archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial is missing.

E: Unable to read /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/ – opendir (2: No such file or directory)

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# apt-get clean all

root@ka4udx-desktop:/var/spool# apt-get -f install

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

Correcting dependencies… Done

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:

Like this:

I turned on DirecTV today and tried to get NBC 6 (or anything else HD for that matter) and I was getting “Satellite not found” errors. I looked at the Weather over South Florida …

Weather over South Florida on Super Bowl Sunday

Anyway after trying and trying all the HD channels … I watched the Super Bowl a bit in SD … I decided to do a reset on my Satellite Receiver Box and after it came back on and re-aligned and tracked everything (got satellite info., …) The HD channels came back just fine.

I also moved my Amateur Radio VHF Yagi Antenna (turned it) to make sure it wasn’t adding to the obstruction of the DirecTV Satellites as well.

The box could have become “hung” a bit after losing the satellites due to obstructions … It is also possible that I glitched it last night transmitting with 500 to 600 watts on H.F. / SSB on Amateur Radio. I probably should turn that box off when transmitting on H.F./SSB.

Like this:

This is part one of hopefully more of a long session on 40 meters involving Dave – G0EVY – Golf Zero Echo Victor Yankee – a very fine station in the U.K. with a very good sounding signal – if you didn’t know better you’d think it was a local broadcast station. Some of the other stations signals are of varying strength … and it was all quite enjoyable … arm chair kind of chat. Try doing that with your iPhone or android without any charges at all for the air time. The UK and Switzerland we have in this slice … more came later.

I purchased this cable, as did another reviewer that I read from on here did, for use in Amateur (Ham) Radio. Modern transceivers require external digital and relay keying connections – in my case an Ameritron AL-811 Linear Amplifier to a Kenwood TS-480 HF/6Meter All Mode Transceiver. The linear amplifier requires ALC – Automatic Level Control connection and Relay (Transmit Keying) connections – all from this kind of Mini Din 8-pin plug. Cut the cable and wire in RCA phono jacks correctly and you have an excellent quality cable worth $30 or more on Ebay or elsewhere (if you can find it.)

Excellent quality cable, easy to solder to the wire to make a specialized cable. It put me on the air with my 600Watt Linear Amplifier. I would recommend it to anyone doing the same thing … or for other purposes needing the 8-pin mini din to 8-pin mini din (or modify the cable yourself as I did.)